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Episode 1479: Multisport Sabermetrics Exchange (Esports and Volleyball)
Date December 30, 2019 Summary In the fifth installment of a special, seven-episode series on the past, present, and future of advanced analysis in non-baseball sports, Ben Lindbergh talks to ESports One Head of Esports Data Science Tim Sevenhuysen about esports and then Volleymetrics founder Giuseppe Vinci about volleyball (43:25), touching on the origins of sabermetrics-style analysis in each sport, the major challenges, big breakthroughs, and overturned misconceptions, the early adopters, the cutting-edge stats and tech, the level of acceptance within the game, the effects on the spectator experience, the parallels with baseball, and more. Topics * Interview with Tim Sevenhuysen * How Tim became interested in ESports * History and variety of ESports and how to analyze them * Isolating player value * Counter-Strike player ratings * Borrowing concepts from traditional sports * Clutch Gaming and corporate partnerships * Impact of frequent game structure changes * Importance of player flexibility * Team scouting methods * Career trajectories and social aging-out * Interview with Giuseppe Vinci * Volleyball's long history with analytics * Early implementation of skill grading * Impact of rule changes * Importance of Side Out percentage * Missed serve frequency * Acceptance of analytics by players and coaches * Prioritizing team performance over opponent scouting * Comparing beach and indoor volleyball * Player tracking and wearable technology Intro Wild Fire, "Video Warrior" Interstitial Of Montreal, "Spike the Senses" Outro Guided by Voices, "The Rally Boys" Notes * Tim thinks that Counter-Strike is the easiest ESport for analytics, rating it a 7 or 8 out of 10. He gives Defense of the Ancients (Dota) 2 a 6/10 and League of Legends (LoL) a 5/10. * Esports as a whole is only about 20 years old. Pro leagues began appearing in 2013/14 and it wasn't until 2015 that some leagues mandated teams have coaches. * Most games do not have any form of analytics because of either a lack of data or the type of game. * There haven't been many cases of analytics overturning conventional wisdom. Tim's analysis did identify in LoL that conventional wisdom overrated some elemental dragons and underrated others. * Patches are frequent (every two weeks to two months, depending on the game), adding to the complexity of deciding which data to include in your model and comparing data sets across patches. After six months of accumulated patches, the game has changed significantly. * Since the rules change frequently, it is essential to be able to develop new strategies faster than your opponents. Teams try not to over-specialize. * Tim says that ESports have not been professional enough to see if there is an impact that physical aging has on players. He says most players leave because of "social aging out" where they are either overworked by the schedule or not interested in having ESports consume their entire life anymore. * Giuseppe rates volleyball an 8/10 for ease of analysis and highlights the game's history with analytics that dates back to the 1970s. * In the 1980s the USA Men's Indoor Volleyball team were innovators with use of analytics and won gold medals in 1984 and 1988. * In 1999, the rules to volleyball were changed to shorten matches, which had grown to three hours or longer. Under "rally scoring", every serve leads to a point for one team or the other. Under the old "side out scoring" system, only the team serving could earn a point. * A Side Out is when the team receiving the serve scores a point. A team's Side Out percentage is the best indicator of whether or not they will win a match. * Missed serves are not as detrimental as previously believed. This leads to more bad serves, which detracts from the spectator experience. * Giuseppe says that almost all professional, national, and Division 1 NCAA teams employ an analyst or make use of data to improve their team's performance. * Even at lower levels, it is easy to record a match for later study because the entire court can be captured from a fixed camera. * Analytics have been a part of volleyball for decades, and players grew up accepting it. * Beach volleyball strategy is tailored to the opponent, so players need to study how their opponents played against them specifically (or teams similar to them). Indoor volleyball strategy is more opponent-independent. * There are far fewer opportunities to be an elite beach volleyball player, so strong indoor players tend not to try to switch to sand. * There have been occasional players who switched and excelled at both (such as Karch Kiraly, who won Olympic gold medals in both indoor and beach volleyball), but even those players never played both indoor and beach at the same time. * Over the years, players have gotten taller, but the net hasn't changed height. * At higher levels many players use wearable technology that tracks how many times and how high they jump during a match. During practices, the number of jumps is monitored to prevent injury. * Giuseppe was surprised to find that jumping higher than average does not have a great impact on a player's performance. Links * Effectively Wild Episode 1479: Multisport Sabermetrics Exchange (Esports and Volleyball) * The Wild West of E-sports Stats by Ben Lindbergh * How an ‘Overwatch’ Update Derailed One of the Most Dominant Teams in Esports by Ben Lindbergh and Rob Arthur * How ‘Overwatch’ Is Tackling the Esports Stats Problem by Ben Lindbergh * Big Data Is The Future Of ESports by Eric Van Allen * One Jungle Share at a Time: Meet the Bill James of Esports by Luke Winkie * League of Legends esports teams turn to Tim ‘Magic’ Sevenhuysen for ‘Moneyball’ counsel by Dean Takahashi * Meet Tim Sevenhuysen, the Statistician Trying to Solve League of Legends by Sharon Coone * League statistician Tim Sevenhuysen on why he created Shadow, a new stats tool: “We can do better” by Xing Li * Oracle's Elixir * LCS 2020 Post-Free Agency Power Rankings – 10 to 6 by Tim Sevenhuysen * LCS 2020 Post-Free Agency Power Rankings – 5 to 1 by Tim Sevenhuysen * Good Game Well Played: The Story of the Staying Power of ‘StarCraft’ by Ben Lindbergh * Volleymetrics * VolleyMetrics: The Moneyball of Volleyball by Virginia Pham * We Get Schools In Advanced Volleyball Metrics by Neil Paine and Jody Avrigan * BYU Men's Volleyball: Statistical analysis key to Cougars' success by Darnell Dickson Category:Episodes Category:Guest Episodes